Likes & Launch

Rise of Collaboration KPIs

(Photo: Splice in action, source: Billboard.)

Two weeks ago we kicked off the first Product Management Summit of 2014. It’s an event we hold twice a year for a full day to bring together all of the Product managers from the USV Portfolio. The goal of these summits is to provide portfolio peers a place to share best practices, lessons learned and tools that make the biggest impact. Given the diversity of perspectives, I always learn a ton from these events.

As a way to give more insight about each company, we always start the day with introductions and a question. At this event we asked each Product Manager to share one of the KPIs that they are currently focused on.

As you would imagine, most product KPIs revolve around user growth, downloads, content consumed, and revenue growth. Now one KPI that surprised me was from Splice, it was “number of collaborations”.

This makes sense, Splice is a platform that allows music creators to share pieces of music in order to collaborate to make a final song, but it’s the first time I’ve had a company mention collaboration as a KPI.

Now, collaboration is a not a new thing, especially not in music. Many songs on Soundcloud were collaborations between multiple people, they just didn’t happen on the platform. Since Soundcloud isn’t a tool for creation, they wouldn’t measure number of collaborations, only completed songs. Shared works in progress and final products have a home on SoundCloud, but not the process in between.

Building a platform focused on multiple people working together brings up some interesting challenges:

1. Collaboration already happens, why is it a problem to solve?

Most collaborations happen offline. Co-creating in the open is challenging and there aren’t many tools that help make it easier (yet). The Postal Service got their band’s namesake from sending files to each other by mail. Now with digital file sharing, files can be shared in an instant but usually aren’t shared publicly. And even if they are, it requires a purchase of closed software like Abelton on both sides to open or change the file.

2. Collaboration as a digital workflow can be clunky.

If you work on a team of more than 5 people you’ve probably used a tool to collaborate on a project. Whether it was Google docs, Asana or Pivotal Tracker, members of your team likely had to make adjustments to their regular workflows to participate in the collaborative workflow. If everyone isn’t using the same tools, it’s harder to work together than defaulting back to email.

3. Roles and responsibilities are undefined and changing.

If you’ve used a digital collaboration tool with your team there is usually a clear definition of who’s on the team, what they will work on and what the end goal is. With an open collaboration platform, people can collaborate with people they’ve never met. The only unifying incentive would be the final product, but that can be largely undefined until work begins.

4. A social network built on differences.

Facebook and Linkedin, are social networks based on people you know. SoundCloud, Twitter and Wattpad are a social network for people with shared interests. On a collaboration platform, it’s a social network of strangers who have different, but complimentary, skill sets. If everyone was the same, it may not create interesting collaborations. It’s the fact that individuals find people who are different than them that makes it work.

5. User acquisition should come in twos.

For most social networks user acquisition is very much a single player. If you acquire one customer and they start using the product, that is a win. With a collaboration network, you need at least two people. If people were able to collaborate without the platform, why wouldn’t they do that? There isn’t really a ‘single player mode’. You need two people working together to consider it a win.

6. Convert teams but encourage side projects.

There will be existing teams that use a collaboration tool. It might be harder to get those team collaborations on platform because they probably already have an offline workflow to complete tasks together. Github is a great example of a collaborative tool that teams love. Developers get hooked on the tool at work and then expand to use it for themselves to work on personal or open source projects.

7. Skills make the team, acquire talent to fill gaps.

The ideal customer for a collaboration network is someone that has an underutilized skill and wants to collaborate with other people. Or someone who has a project they started that is missing something. They key is to help surface these skills or projects to the network to encourage collaboration. A customer must know what they are good at and how they can contribute. That can be a harder target to hit with user acquisition since it could be very open ended. If the person who started the project already knew someone who could help complete it, they could’ve brought them on.

Closing thoughts:

I’ll be curious to watch as more collaborative companies figure out the best way to grow their collaboration KPIs. From Splice to Scratch, Github to Assembly, the next wave of social is emerging. This time it’s about bringing together strangers with complimentary skill sets, not just shared interests. Where else have you seen this happen?

Who are your diversity ambassadors?

In the tech community there has been a lot of talk about diversity, gender ratios and the trouble with homogenous perspectives. Equality is always a worthy topic and should be a constant topic until we find it.

The challenge with reading a lot about these issues is that they teach us more about what not to do than how to encourage the right things.

How do you empower all employees to be part of the solution, not just police bad behavior?

When you’re growing your company, you need to find people with the skills where you have holes. That requires you to seek out people unlike the current people on your team. Diversity makes sense.

I’ve heard more conversations about how to be mindful about diversity as an organization grows. One common question is, how do you take action and empower all of your employees to participate? The answer is different for every company but the best place to start is by taking inventory of what’s currently happening:

Do you consider your team diverse or homogenous (diversity goes beyond the physical, it’s background, education, experience: work or worldly, viewpoints, and beyond)?
Is there someone currently taking the lead on ensuring there is diversity on the team?
Has this person become the default diversity ambassador? Was it given to them by default based on their ‘diverse’ qualities? Did they choose that role? Did you?
Who speaks up when something is offensive? Who shakes their head when a rude joke is made?
Who notices when the team is too similar?
Who is doing outreach to diversity groups?
Who’s asking the question: Why don’t we have more men on our team? Why don’t we have more women?
Are there people who might feel excluded who currently work at your company? or who want to work at your company?

Take inventory.

Who do you believe is doing a good job? Is it one person? Are there multiple people? Are you one of them? These are your diversity ambassadors.

Diversity Ambassadors are great but they can’t do it alone. They can’t be in every conversation. They can’t be the only ones on this mission. It won’t work.

Everyone needs the diversity ambassador mindset.

If everyone has the conversation, it doesn’t fall on the minority group to speak up for minorities. If everyone in your company knows that people should be treated equally, everyone will participate equally in upholding the mission.

Start the conversation in your company. Use a public forum or an anonymous survey. It’s up to you but have the conversation:

Does this feel like an inclusive workplace?
Are there things we do that might make team members feel excluded?
Do you think there are candidates who would feel uncomfortable working here?
Are there missing perspectives about building the team? about building the product?
Do we have perspectives on our team who are similar to our customers?
Are there customer perspectives that are underrepresented on our team?
Do you have ideas on how we can improve our workplace?
How as a team do we work to solve this?

This can make people uncomfortable. It can be an awkward situation for any group that feels under- or over-represented. And there likely isn’t an easy answer on how to solve it. But it’s a future worth working towards.

A number of these discussions have already started. I’m curious to hear what you’ve seen work well or go wrong within your organization. Please let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

How early stage employees ask for help

You’ve been #hustling for the past year at your startup. Your team has doubled and doubled again. What was once ten people huddled in a makeshift office is now a group of fifty people collaborating to make this one idea into a ‘real company.’

Grind/Dream poster by Joey Roth.

You’ve never been more excited or more exhausted. You stop to look back at where you were a year ago and are shocked at how little you knew. You took on budget or human resources or design or mobile because someone had to do it. You stepped up to the plate and you did the best you could. You helped get the company where it is today. Although you probably don’t hear it as much as you’d like from your CEO, thank you. Thank you. You are a part of what got the company here today.

The high from looking how far you’ve come quickly wears off when you look back at your inbox. Messages about that upcoming deadline. More engineers coming on board but not enough budget to add more hires who aren’t building the core of the product. You’ve added two people to your team but you still feel like you’re absorbing every loose end. You are the person who took on every challenge before, so why should that change?

Yes, you’ve found yourself reading a blog post about employee burnout but then you catch yourself. Burnout is for other people. Burnout is for people who don’t sleep more than 4 hours a day. Hm, maybe you should read do a little research on how people get by with 4 hours of sleep, you could do that just for a little while, right?

NO! Less sleep is never (#hustle mindset: rarely) the answer. What you need help with is reprioritizing. You have too many things on your plate that you can no longer see what’s important. There is no way that you’re doing an excellent job at too many things. It’s impossible.

How do you prioritize when everything feels business critical? First, not everything is business critical, and if it is, then why aren’t any of the other 20-50 people on your team working on this? Everything is not business critical.

Take a deep breath. Say it with me now: “Everything is not business critical.” Repeat it until you believe it.

Now, how do you know what is business critical? Make a priority list by using three questions:

What am I working on?
What should I be working on?
What would I work on if I had more time?

Become an office space expert in 5 hours

When looking for office space, a growth mindset can be a huge time suck.

Startup Founders who want to find and secure office space on their own are at a disadvantage. There is a steep learning curve to get up to understand pricing, build relationships and foresee potential pitfalls. Even if you do get significantly up the learning curve, the opportunity to use that knowledge only happens every few years (at best).

Even if you have an expert on staff or a trusted broker, their services rarely apply when you’re opening an office in a new office. We’ve had a number of our portfolio companies open second offices in SF, NYC and London. It’s very rare to find an expert in all three markets.

The best strategy? Focus on finding trusted resources through referrals and get back to building your business.

If you are thinking of opening a new office but looking for advice? You’re in luck! Two of the experts in the USV Network, Alex Miller from Stack Exchange and real estate lawyer Jason Gelman, are taking their knowledge public in an upcoming Skillshare class:

How to Find, Negotiate and Build Out Your Perfect Office

If you haven’t visited Stack Exchange’s new office yet, you should attend this class just to see it. Beautiful space, amazing kitchen and private honeycomb offices for all engineers. Did I mention that they’re hiring?

If you’re looking for a smaller space or co-working space, we’ve started a public list of startup real estate resources in NYC. Additions welcome.

Don’t go it alone when opening a new office. Learn the basics, lean on experts and get back to work.

If you want to build a massive platform…

To think massive, you have to think of solving a small problem for millions of people. “Tumblr is minimalist and easy to use but also infinitely customizable; it is a genuine creative tool.” - David Karp >David Karp hates screens but built one of the largest blogging platforms on the web. He didn’t build it in the image he wanted to spread. He built it so the community could create it in their own image. Want to build something big? Create tools that are powerful and flexible.

Tumblr is a tool for self expression.
Splice for music creation.
Twilio for voice integration.
Twitter globalized conversations.

Yes there are services too. But they are tools that make it easier to do what people are already doing. Those are the best kind of tools, the ones you’ve been missing. When you find them, you don’t change your habit or work flow, they just make it easier to get from start to finish.

Whatever you build, the tool, network or platform has to be better than the tool people are already using. If email is the main way people are completing a task (sharing files, sending photos, storing conversations), it’s a hard competitor to kill because it’s not hard enough to stop doing it.

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